What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

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The iron cage revisited institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields

This article synthesizes the large but diverse literature on organizational legitimacy, highlighting similarities and disparities among the leading strategic and institutional approaches. The analysis identifies three primary forms of legitimacy: pragmatic, based on audience self-interest; moral, based on normative approval: and cognitive, based on comprehensibility and taken-for-grantedness. The article then examines strategies for gaining, maintaining, and repairing legitimacy of each type, suggesting both the promises and the pitfalls of such instrumental manipulations.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/258788.pdf

Managing Legitimacy: Strategic and Institutional Approaches

Stakeholder theory has been a popular heuristic for describing the management environment for years, but it has not attained full theoretical status. Our aim in this article is to contribute to a theory of stakeholder identification and salience based on stakeholders possessing one or more of three relationship attributes: power, legitimacy, and urgency. By combining these attributes, we generate a typology of stakeholders, propositions concerning their salience to managers of the firm, and research and management implications.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/259247.pdf

Toward a Theory of Stakeholder Identification and Salience: Defining the Principle of who and What Really Counts

This chapter aims to develop one of perhaps multiple specifications of embeddedness, a concept that has been used to refer broadly to the contingent nature of economic action with respect to cognition, social structure, institutions, and culture. Research on embeddedness is an exciting area in sociology and economics because it advances understanding of how social structure affects economic life. The chapter addresses propositions about the operation and outcomes of interfirm networks that are guided implicitly by ceteris paribus assumptions. While economies of time due to embeddedness have obvious benefits for the individual firm, they also have important implications for allocative efficiency and the determination of prices. Under the conditions, social processes that increase integration combine with resource dependency problems to increase the vulnerability of networked organizations. The level of investment in an economy promotes positive changes in productivity, standards of living, mobility, and wealth generation.

Social Structure and Competition in Interfirm Networks: The Paradox of Embeddedness

This article applies the convergent insights of institutional and resource dependence perspectives to the prediction of strategic responses to institutional processes. The article offers a typology of strategic responses that vary in active organizational resistance from passive conformity to proactive manipulation. Ten institutional factors are hypothesized to predict the occurrence of the alternative proposed strategies and the degree of organizational conformity or resistance to institutional pressures.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/258610.pdf

Strategic responses to institutional processes

Sociological Perspectives on the Face-to-Face Enactment of Class Distinction

The Museum and the Public

Research resources are likely to be critical determinants of the technical quality of nongovernmental evaluation research, and quality in turn may affect the utility of the research. It is hypothes...

An Example of Evaluation Research as a Cottage Industry: The Technical Quality and Impact of Arts Audience Studies

How would we characterize the relationship between religion and the arts in the Philadelphia area between 1965 and 1997? The late 1980s and early 1990s in Philadelphia followed a decade that was unusually free of contention between religion and the arts In comparison to the 1970s and early 1980s, religious participation in cultural conflict was not particularly high during the "culture-war" era However, religious discourse as opposed to participation did play a role in more controversies during the late 1980s and 1990s The findings also suggest that after 1986 religious actors and their allies were far more likely to employ the tools of social-movement mobilization and to connect their own claims to national social movements or campaigns

The Role of Religion in Public Conflicts over the Arts in the Philadelphia Area, 1965-1997

AUTHOR DiMaggio, Paul; Ostrower, Francie TITLE Race, Ethnicity and Participation in the Arts: Patterns of Participation by Black, Hispanic and White Americans in Selected Activities from the 1982 and 1985 Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts. INSTITUTION National Endowment for the Arts, Washington, D.C. PUB DATE Jun 87 CONTRACT NEA-C86-192 NOTE 290p. PUB TYPE Reports Research/Technical (143)

/pdf/race-ethnicity-and-participation-in-the-arts-patterns-of-5dybnp2xw4.pdf

Race, Ethnicity and Participation in the Arts: Patterns of Participation by Black, Hispanic and White Americans in Selected Activities from the 1982 and 1985 Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts.

Paul DiMaggio

Papers

Sociological Perspectives on the Face-to-Face Enactment of Class Distinction

The Museum and the Public

An Example of Evaluation Research as a Cottage Industry: The Technical Quality and Impact of Arts Audience Studies

The Role of Religion in Public Conflicts over the Arts in the Philadelphia Area, 1965-1997

Race, Ethnicity and Participation in the Arts: Patterns of Participation by Black, Hispanic and White Americans in Selected Activities from the 1982 and 1985 Surveys of Public Participation in the Arts.